1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electrical connectors and particularly to connector modules incorporating diverse elements including signal conditioning components and/or visual indicators. The invention has particular adaptability to modular jacks.
2. Brief Description of Prior Developments
At present, connectors such as modular jacks are usually mounted onto a circuit board forming a part of the electronic device for which the modular jack is an input/output connection. The terminals of the jack are usually electrically connected to surface traces on the circuit board by through-hole or surface mount soldering techniques. The circuit traces in turn lead to discrete signal processing elements such as low pass filters, common mode chokes, isolation transformers and other inductors to process electronic signals provided to or from the jack. Such signal conditioning elements are necessary to accommodate ever increasing signal rates achieved in telecommunications and data transmission networks.
Developers of network systems and the like have expressed a desire to have the line status of an array of such modular jacks independently indicated for each jack. The usual way of accomplishing this is to provide a series of LEDs on the circuit board, with light transmitting elements for carrying light from the LED to a portion of the face plate of the device in which the array of jacks is mounted. Because the LEDs are considered relatively electrically noisy, they are usually mounted on an electrically isolated, separately grounded portion of the circuit board. In turn, this results in the visual indicators being separated from the jacks. This separation causes the determination of line status for an array of jacks to be made more difficult.